What if I told you there was a civil rights leader who mentored Rosa Parks years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott?

Who spent the early 1940s in small towns across the south, calling on barber shops, beauty parlors, grocery stores, churches, talking with sharecroppers, talking about how black people could fight Jim Crow.

And who convinced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that blacks needed a civil rights base in the south like the NAACP in the north, but more activist.

And urged an initially reluctant King, then a young minister, to capitalize on the momentum of the bus boycott and expand protest throughout the south.

You are probably guessing this is a woman. And you would be right.

Ella Baker, Afro Newspapers, Gado/Getty, Sept. 18, 1941.

Ella J. Baker was known as a difficult woman. She didn't care.

Working for the NAACP 1940-1946, she encountered men who doubted women's capabilities and who wanted to hold tight to their hierarchical structure and middle-class membership.

Ella wanted to involve poor blacks and women, and she believed ordinary people could organize and lead themselves and change unjust structures in society.

She also didn't care that her accomplishments went unnoticed. She worked behind the scenes helping people empower themselves, saying "Strong people don't need strong leaders.”

In her years of grassroots work for the NAACP, Ella admitted the seemly endless small church meetings could often be “more exhausting than the immediate returns seem to warrant, but it’s a part of the spade work....Give light and people will find the way.”

By 1946, Ella had become so fed up with the NAACP for it's resistance to grassroots organizing and lack of inclusion, she quit. Though she still participated in the local chapter where she lived in New York.

Ella Baker, standing third from the right with a group of girls at a fair sponsored by the NAACP, early 1950s, courtesy New York Public Library.

Courtesy New York Public Library

After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of sixty black ministers gathered for a conference and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South.

It was Ella's idea. Not to sound like a school kid, arguing about who had an idea first, but leaving Ella out of the story of the SCLC is like forgetting you have a backbone.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is lauded by everyone as the SCLC's first president. Google its founders and you'll find the names of Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others. And others is Ella Baker.

In 1960, when the Greensboro Four staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, Ella had served two years as SCLC Executive Director. She saw the energy and commitment of the students staging sit ins. She saw their potential and wanted to support them.

Student attendees at the conference show in the first issue pf SNCC's newspaper.

Within three months she organized a conference of hundreds of college students.“[I] felt there had to be some contact between the various student groups which had sprung up, or they might peter out of a lack of the nourishment of ideas and sustenance of morale that come from such contacts.”

Diane Nash attended. “We felt a real kinship with the students who were working in other cities, to bring about the same things that we were.”

Ella urged the students to see the sit-in movement as “bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke....[But as a movement to scourge America] “of racial segregation and discrimination – not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.”

From this gathering of students sprouted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, pronounced "Snick." Built from the bottom up, SNCC turned the tide of the Civil Rights Movement to direct action. To protests, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides against segregation, the 1963 March on Washington and Freedom Summer voting registration drives in Mississippi.

Martin Luther King had wanted the students to become become an arm of the SCLS, but Baker urged them to form their own group, and to include women and the poor.

She clashed with King, pushing for more voices to be heard, and for more people to be empowered. "To be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." Ella said once. "This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be."

Scholar Cornel West says Ella was like a jazz musician. "She's antiphonal, call and response, she's in conversation. She's not pontificating from above, she's having conversation on a horizontal level."

“I wasn’t one to say yes, just because [an idea] came from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was not an easy pushover," Ella said. "It’s a strange thing about men,… if they haven’t ever had a woman say no to them, they don’t know what to do sometimes.”

Andrew Young articulated the feelings of the male leaders about Ella Baker. "The Baptist church had no tradition of women in independent leadership roles, and the result was dissatisfaction all around."

Ella resigned from the Southern Leadership Council to work with the SNCC young people, shock troops in the battle for equal rights.

“The young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going," Ella said, "the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organization.”

Perhaps the influence of Ella's enslaved grandmother helped her speak up and believe in fighting for equality. Her grandmother was offspring of a slave and master. And because of that, the day after her birth the jealous mistress of the plantation poisoned the newborn's mother.

Ella listened to her grandmother's stories of resilience and bravery, of being raised in slave quarters and put to work in the big house. "But at the point at which she was of marriageable age...the mistress wanted to have her married to a man whom we knew as Uncle Carter. He was also light. And she didn't like Carter. And so when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped."

Instead of the whipping, Ella's grandmother was forced to plow in the fields. When plowing began each year February, it was so cold she'd have to stop work to warm her hands on the horse's belly. Ella said, "I've heard her say that she would plow all day and dance all night. She was defiant."

The SNCC flourished with Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement. It grew quickly in the fertile soil of all that spade-turning Ella had done in the 1940s.

Diane Nash, (in photo) explained how Ella inspired her. “I could count on Miss Baker being truthful and she would explain many things very honestly to me, and I would leave her feeling emotionally picked up dusted off and ready to go.”

Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize.That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive

The anthem of freedom, Ella's Song, recorded by "Sweet Hone In The Rock" still rings true today.

We who believe in Freedom cannot rest until it comesUntil the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sonsIs as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons.

People called Ella Baker by the nickname Fundi, a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. She continued to work for civil rights until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986.

The more recent civil rights groups Occupy and Black Lives Matter Global Network embrace Baker's organizational ideals. Both have been criticized for their lack of leadership. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter responded by saying, "We are not a leaderless movement, we are a leaderfull movement."

We shortchange ourselves when we overlook the leadership of Ella Baker. Yes, because she is an example of a powerful black woman, and a woman who maneuvered her way through gender stereotypes, but also because the work of her life demonstrates that successful enterprises need various kinds of leadership, that investing in a charismatic leader without cultivating a leadership base may jeopardize the cause.

Tell me what you think! Did you know all this about Ella Baker? Leave your comment below. I'm sure glad I stumbled on her name and dug deeper. It gives me pause now, to think how often I've longed for a charismatic leader to pull Americans together to work for justice, and to take climate change seriously.

One of the things that fascinates me is the discovery of historical details and connections that add layers of meaning to our understanding, and to the stories we tell about the past.

Recently, I learned of the threads that connect Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank. The girls were born within one month of each other in 1929, Anne in Germany and Audrey in Belgium. Audrey lived with her English-Austrian father in England for several years, but by the time the war broke out, both girls had moved to the Netherlands, where they ended up living just miles apart.

​After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in the spring of 1940, Jewish Anne Frank would become known to the world for the diary she wrote while hiding for her life. She would die in a Nazi death camp.

Audrey Hepburn's parents supported Adolf Hitler, her father an agent for the Nazi regime, her mother an admirer of the Fuhrer.

But Audrey joined the resistance and suffered near starvation under German occupation resulting in her often-admired slender figure, famous in the movies Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's.

At the end of World War II and the Netherlands' Hunger Winter, Audrey, aged sixteen, stood five foot six, but weighed only 88-pounds.

She was one of the first to read Anne Frank's diary, but asked to play in a movie based on Diary of a Young Girl, Audrey declined the role, saying it was too painful.

Her son Luca Dotti told People Magazine his mother knew passages of Anne Frank's diary by heart. “My mother never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne. She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.”

Audrey Hepburn's British-Austrian father and Dutch Baroness mother both held fascist sympathies in the 1930s. Ella van Heemstra had a private meeting with Adolf Hitler, where, to the Baroness's bliss, the Nazi leader kissed her hand.

Audrey Hepburn and her mother Ella Van Heemstra

Audrey's father left the family before the war,and apparently in 1942, her mother had a change of heart about Hitler after the Nazis executed her sister's husband.

Otto van Limburg Stirum was arrested in retaliation for sabotage by the resistance movement. He and four others were driven to a forest, made to dig their own graves and then shot.

Before that, the realities of the war had come gradually to Audrey.

“The first few months we didn’t know quite what had happened … I just went to school,” Hepburn said. “In the schools, the children learned their lessons in arithmetic with problems like this: ‘If 1,000 English bombers attack Berlin and 900 are shot down, how many will return to England?’"

Audrey had started to learn ballet as a young girl in England, and as conditions became strained and dangerous, she turned back to dance to relieve the pressure of Nazi rule.

"When I would go to the station, there were cattle cars packed with Jewish families, with old people and children,” Hepburn once said. “We did not yet know that they were traveling to their deaths. People said they were going to the ‘countryside.’ It was very difficult to understand, for I was a child. All the nightmares of my life are mixed in with those images.”

A quiet, withdrawn child, Audey bloomed on the stage and soon began to perform at illegal events in hidden venues with the windows blacked out. These by-invitation-only zwarte avonden, black evenings, raised money for the Dutch Resistance.

“Guards were posted outside to let us know when Germans approached,” Hepburn would later say. “The best audiences I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”

​Audrey Hepburn Aides Nazi Resistance

Audrey also helped deliver tiny-sized copies of a resistance newspaper, Oranjekrant. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.” As a teenager, she avoided the suspicions of police and was also able to carry messages and food to Allied pilots shot down over the Netherlands in 1944.

Though Audrey's mother had been known as a lipstick Nazi for being friendly with German soldiers early in the war, she sheltered an English pilot in their home. Luca Dotti wrote that it was a thrilling experience for Audrey. "It was risky, he was a stranger in uniform, a savior, and therefore a knight and hero. [But] if you were caught hiding an enemy, the whole family would be taken away.”

Dutch people in the countryside felt the deprivations of war acutely in the winter of 1944-45, later known as Hongerwinter, Hunger Winter. Families went without heat and electricity and food grew scarce. Audrey sometimes didn't eat for as long as three days, and sometimes subsisted on bread made from brown beans and potatoes.

Children at soup kitchen during the Hunger Winter of Nazi Occupation in Holland.

According to Hepburn's son, “Twenty two thousand people died from hunger in Holland during the final months of World War II, my mother escaping death by a hairbreadth.”

Audrey's town was finally liberated by Allied troops in spring 1945.

​Throughout her life, Audrey Hepburn spoke very little about the war years, some say out of fear that her parents' Nazi sympathies might harm her acting career.

A good number of books have told the story of Audrey Hepburn's movie star career, jet-setting life and generosity as an ambassador for UNICEF. But a new biography out this month focuses specifically on her life during World War II.

I wrote about new evidence concerning the arrest of Anne Frank's family here...

Did you know the Trump Administration is escalating our war in Somalia?

I must admit, I didn't know we had a war in Somalia.

It's part of the War on Terrorism, and it shakes out to at least 500 troops on the ground in Somalia, and increasing numbers of air strikes over the the last two months.

The attacks killed 225 people in January and February, according to the New York Times, compared to 326 in all of 2018.

20th Special Forces Group participating in Flintlock 18, exercise in Niger, Africa on April 16, 2018. (US Military Photo)

Of course, these air strikes are targeting bad guys, al Qaeda Shabaab insurgents, and supporting good guys, the U.N.-backed Somalian government troops.

Shortly after President Trump took office, he declared Somalia an “area of active hostilities” subject to war-zone rules. This designation allows the U.S. military to readily attack Shabab militants, including foot soldiers with no special skills or role, and it permits the killing of civilian bystanders.

Four people died in a U.S. assault March 10th, 2019, according to a relative of one of the victims. The relative told Reuters one of those killed was an employee of the firm Hormuud Telecom.

The U.S. Africa Command acknowledged it carried out the air strike on Sunday, saying that three militants had died in the attack, as well as three separate attacks in a five-day stretch of February killing 35, 20 and 26 people. More on the war in Somalia here.

The Shabab have proved resilient against the American airstrikes, and continue to carry out regular bombings in East Africa, and the stepped-up attacks are exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Somalia.

Why all the bad news?Just setting the stage for this feature story....

Why all this bad news? Just setting the stage for this feature story.

In the midst of decades of violence, drought and famine in Somalia, there's one woman who's been making enemies peaceful, feeding the hungry and standing up to al Qaeda like a one woman army.

​Her name is Dr. Hawa Abdi, the saint Rambo comparison came from Glamour Magazine, when it named Dr. Abdi Woman of the Year in 2010, along with her two daughters, also doctors in Somalia.

In the refugee camp where Dr. Abdi convinced enemies to lay down their grudges, she called simply "Mama Hawa".

"They are very angry and mentally not [there] when they are coming to you," Abdi she told NPR. "Their parents or their brothers, their wives, their fathers were killed in front of them. They're coming to me. There is no government. The whole society became violent."

Dr. Abdi became one of Somalia's first female gynecologists in 1971, after medical school in the Soviet Ukraine.

She worked in Mogadishu’s largest hospital until 1983, when she left, deciding she wanted to provide free medical care to dirt-poor women who would never be able to afford having a baby in a hospital.

"I decided to open my own clinic next to our family’s home in a rural area, 15 miles from the capital. Within a few months, I was seeing 100 patients a day."

When the country exploded in civil war in 1991 and the Somalian government collapsed, Dr. Abdi's clinic and her home turned into a triage center. Hundreds, than thousands of people, mostly women and children, settled in temporary shelter in the doctor's family's ancestral lands surrounding the clinic.

Dr. Abdi sold her family’s gold to buy food to keep the children alive and give adults the strength to dig graves. We clung to one another and we survived, but the fighting continued," said Dr. Abdi.

For the following two decades, destruction, violence, drought and famine ravaged her homeland and Dr. Abdi raised her own children while providing a safe haven for refugees. Her one-room clinic became a 400 bed hospital, and her thousand-acre farma displaced person camp.

She worked 12-hour days, 7 days a week, delivering babies, treating gunshot wounds, and providing IV lines of nourishment to starving children.

By 2010, With help from the U.N. "Hawa's Camp" was providing food, clean water, and shelter to 90,000 refugees. Dr. Abdi had two strict rules to preserve the peace. First, no one is allowed to talk about clan or family, the most divisive issue in Somalia. Second, men are not allowed to beat their wives.

Dr. Hawa in the camp (2007). Photo: (Kuni Takahashi/Getty Images)

Though conditions have improved in the camp, Somalia remains wracked by war and over the years local warlords tried to shut her operation down at gunpoint They've blocked aid, raided her camp with machine guns, and threatened her life several times.

In May 2010 Islamist militants arrived at the gate, demanding Dr. Abdi turn over management of the hospital and camp to them, as women are not allowed to hold positions of power under their brand of Islam. She invited them to sit down to dinner.

After eating, "Six Hizbul Islam soldiers, jittery, aggressive young men with -henna-dyed beards, wearing red-and-white checkered scarves, their index fingers forever on the triggers of their guns," ordered her to leave.

Elders in the camp warned her she'd be shot, but Dr. Abdi stood up to the militants.

"At least I will die with dignity," she said. "They did not shoot me; they pushed back their chairs and left."

Hope Village, near Mogadishu, Somalia. (Photo DHA Foundation)

A week later they were back, 750-strong. This time they fired on the hospital and camp.

"A BBC producer called me during some of the heaviest shelling," said Dr. Abdi. "I told him that the militiamen’s targets were the maternity and surgical wards, and the pediatric malnutrition section. One woman recovering from a C-section I’d performed earlier that day had stood up to run.

"Terrified mothers detached feeding tubes and IV lines from their dehydrated children’s noses and arms to flee into the woods, away from the indiscriminate shooting. A group of militiamen stormed into my room. 'You’ve spoken to the radio, haven’t you?' shouted one."

The armed men demanded her cellphone and and hauled Dr. Abdi and six nurses away, holding them hostage for ten hours. Then the gunmen returned her phone, saying. “You have many supporters,” and ordering her to call people to say she was alive and unharmed.

The following day armed men appear to tell her not to re-open the hospital. She said she would not reopen without a written apology.

“Dr. Hawa, you are stubborn,” one told her.

“I do something for my people and my country,” she said. “What have you done for your people and your country?”

A week later their second-in-command returned with a written apology.

In 2012, Dr. Abdi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

School at Hope Village, Somalia. (Photo DHA Foundation)

​Today 850 young people attend school in the camp, and Mama Hawa insists that equal numbers of boys and girls go to school.

Dr. Adbi now, in her early 70s, runs a foundation to raise money for operations, while the camp and hospital are run by her daughter, Deqo Mohamed, who also became a doctor. It's mission is to secure basic human rights in Somalia through building sustainable institutions in healthcare, education, agriculture, and social entrepreneurship.

At least I thought it did. Turns out a black woman soldier in the 1860s beat them to it.

Painting by William Jennings, U.S. Army Profiles of Bravery

Cathey Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted in Company A of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment in St. Louis, November 1866.

She switched her name to William Cathey, and after what must have been a cursory exam, the army surgeon declared her fit for duty.

Private Cathay was 22-years-old and had actually been serving as an cook for the army throughout most of the civil war. Cathey told her story to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1875.

"My Father a was a freeman, but my mother a slave....While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City, [Missouri]....When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook."

She had little choice. She learned to cook. At sixteen, swallowed by the union army, Cathey saw the Battle of Pea Ridge, a major battle of the Civil War fought near Leetown, northeast of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after which her unit traveled to Louisiana. "I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River." As a servant under General Phillip Sheridan, Cathey saw the soldiers' life on the front lines as his army marched on the Shenandoah Valley. ​ After the war, African American soldiers were posted to the Western frontier, where they battled Native Americans to protect settlers, stagecoaches, wagon trains and railroad crews. They became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” apparently so-named by Native Americans, though history's a little thin on when and why.

Ranks of Buffalo Soldiers who fought in Cuba during the Spanish American war, 1889. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

​After working for the army throughout the war, it's little wonder Cathey came up with the scheme to enlist as the fighting came to a close. With cunning and courage she found a way to survive when opportunities for black women were few to none.​As a Buffalo Soldier, Cathey learned to use a musket, stood guard duty and went on scouting missions. After serving at Fort Riley, Kansas for some months, her company marched 563 miles to Fort Union, New Mexico.

Official reports show Buffalo Soldiers were often sent to the most bitter posts and suffered racist officers, severe discipline and crummy gear, food and shelter. In two years of service, mostly in New Mexico, Cathey needed hospital care four different times for illnesses ranging from "the itch" to rheumatism, yet maintained her secret.

William Cathey's enlistment records (Courtesy the National Archives)

Cathey enlisted for three years, but after two, she was tired of army life and wanted out. She told the St. Louis reporter, “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post surgeon found out I was a woman and I got my discharge."

All indications are that she was a good soldier.

Monument to Cathay Williams, the first-known documented African American woman to serve in the U.S. Army, located in Leavenworth, Kansas. (Courtesy KansasCity.com)

​After her honorable discharge, Cathey worked as a civilian cook and washer woman. Until she could not longer work due to diabetes and nerve pain which required the amputation of her toes. She was unable to walk without a crutch.

In 1891, Cathey petitioned for a veterans pension and benefits. The government rejected her claim, not because she was a woman, that was never argued. The army doctor who examined her found her to be fit, not disabled enough for benefits. There's no record of the life or death of Cathey Williams following that denial of benefits.

In the Nixon Era, Republicans discounted Martha Mitchell's accusations, saying she was mentally unstable. Her attacker got promoted and President Trump recently promoted him again.

In voting to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, the swing voters said the same thing about Christine Blasey Ford. They just used more subtle phrasing. They implied she had been so traumatized she couldn't tell what was real and what was not.

Nothing has changed but the excuses people use to justify discounting women's stories, and the science that would support them.

Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly.​

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.​​Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.

Martha & husband John Mitchell, attorney general in the Richard Nixon administration.

​But then Martha began to suspect Nixon's men were up to "dirty tricks." She listened in on her husband's meetings with Nixon, and concluded members of the campaign were acting illegally.

​Martha had always spoken her mind; the press had dubbed her "mouth from the south."

She complained about the label, which wasn’t applied to men in Washington. “Why do they always call me outspoken? Can’t they just say I’m frank?” She asked. The name calling got worse.

The night arrests in the Watergate break-in hit the news, Martha called reporter Helen Thomas of United Press International to say she thought her husband and the president were somehow involved.

The phone call was suddenly cut short. According to Thomas, “…it appeared someone took away the phone from her hand." She heard Martha say, ‘You just get away.’” Thomas said she called back and the hotel operator told her, “Mrs. Mitchell is indisposed and cannot talk.”

Martha later charged an FBI agent named Stephen King ripped the phone from her hands and subsequently threw her down and kicked her to keep her from making any phone calls. She says under orders from her husband she was locked in her room incommunicado for 24-hours. She was given alcohol, but no food.

This seems like a good point in the story to introduce Stephen King (shown at left). After Nixon was re-elected in 1972, King left the FBI for private industry. Then last year, he was appointed Ambassador to the Czech Republic by Donald Trump.

During his confirmation hearings, no questions came up about allegations he helped in the Watergate cover-up, or that he assaulted a woman to that end.

Martha Mitchell claimed King held her prisoner despite a number of escape attempts. When she tried to exit through a glass door they got into a tussle that broke the glass and her hand was cut so badly she required six stitches.

Martha said a doctor was finally summoned to aide King in keeping her a prisoner. King forced Martha onto the bed and held her down while the doctor removed her pants and gave her a shot of tranquilizer.

A reporter who spoke with Martha after she was released described her as “a beaten woman,” with “incredible" black and blue marks on her arms.

As Nixon fought for his office and reputation, his administration briefed the press about the Martha's lack of credibility. She was portrayed as a paranoid, publicity-seeking and, possibly alcoholic, housewife. Rumors spread that she had been institutionalized for insanity.

Martha wanted Nixon to fire Steve King, but the agent was promoted to chief of security. After leaving the FBI he went on to a lucrative career in chemical manufacturing.

Arriving in Prague, last December, to take up duties as Trump's Ambassador to the Czech Republic, King told Radio Free Europe reporters, "I was there when this matter occurred [with Martha Mitchell]....But I have chosen -- then and now -- not to really speak to it specifically only out of respect to the Mitchell family, those that survive today."

Nixon himself said, “If it hadn’t been for Martha Mitchell, there’d have been no Watergate [scandal].” Scandal, he means. But by the time he resigned in August of 1974, Martha's marriage had crumbled, she appeared to have possibly had an emotional breakdown and had suffered embarrassing publicity.

So far, the only justice for Martha has been in the form of recognition by the mental health community. Harvard psychologist Brendan Maher encountered mental patients incorrectly diagnosed as being delusional, when it turned out their "delusions" were true. He named this the Martha Mitchell Effect. The effect is not a mental problem of the patient, but a mental block on the part of the psychiatrist.

Seems like today we have a mental block on the part of half the senators in Washington.

Thanks to YA Author Jody Casella for telling me about Martha Mitchell. Another courageous woman whose story I had not known.

Cornelia Fort was born to wealth andprivilege, but in a time and place that prescribed her a very narrow role in life. Yet she made bold choices push boundaries and lived of life of daring and adventure few women would even dream of.

Would she have made the same choices, if she'd known it would lead to hear at 24?Growing up in a luxurious mansion built in 1815 on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee, she was expected to become a Southern debutante, attend society functions, marry and have children.

At eighteen, Cornelia wanted to attendSarah Lawrence Collegewhere young women could design their own course of study. Her father at first refused to allow her to apply to that "liberal northern school"and she was sent to Ogontz School for Young Ladies.

In her first major rebellion against the "proper" role assigned to her, Cornelia got her mother to help change her father's mind. She was finally allowed to leave the "oppressive atmosphere" and transfer to Sarah Lawrence, where she graduated with a two-year degree.

Cornelia's next bold move challenging the strictures of women's lives in the 1940s,set her on a course leading to the skies over Pearl Harborat the very hour​the Japanese attacked.

At age five, with her father and three older brothers, Cornelia saw a daring pilot perform acrobatics in the sky.

It appeared so dangerous, Dr. Rufus Fort made his sons promise ( as one story goes, swear an oath on the family bible) they would never fly.

Later, when Cornelia made her first solo flight, one brother chided her for breaking a promise to their father. But Dr. Fort had not thought to ask his daughter not to fly.

She was hooked from her very first time in the sky, saying “It gets under your skin, deep down inside.”

Cornelia Fort became the first female flying instructor in all of Tennessee in 1940. The next year she got a job in Hawaii teaching defense workers, soldiers and sailors to fly.

In November 1941, Cornelia wrote home (her father had died more than year before). "If I leave here, I will leave the best job that I can have (unless the national emergency creates a still better one), a very pleasant atmosphere, a good salary, but far the best of all are the planes I fly. Big and fast and better suited for advanced flying.

On December 7, 1941, she was in the sky with a student pilot when a small plane nearly collided with them. Cornelia grabbed the controls and saved their lives.

Later, she said the plane “passed so close under us that our celluloid windows rattled violently and I looked down to see what kind of plane it was. The painted red balls on the tops of the wings shone brightly in the sun. I looked again with complete and utter disbelief. Honolulu was familiar with the emblem of the Rising Sun on passenger ships but not on airplanes.”

“Then I looked way up and saw the formations of silver bombers riding in. Something detached itself from an airplane and came glistening down. My eyes followed it down, down, and even with knowledge pounding in my mind, my heart turned convulsively when the bomb exploded in the middle of the harbor. I knew the air was not the place for my little baby airplane and I set about landing as quickly as ever I could. A few seconds later a shadow passed over me, and simultaneously bullets spattered all around me.”​See below the entry in Cornelia's logbook for that flight

“Later, we counted anxiously as our little civilian planes came flying home to roost. Two never came back. They were washed ashore weeks later on the windward side of the island, bullet-riddled. Not a pretty way for the brave yellow Cubs and their pilots to go down to death.”

Cornelia survived. And then stepped out of bounds again.

She knew the risks when she became one of the first to volunteer for Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squad (WAFS) “I felt I could be doing something more constructive for my country than knitting socks. Better to go to war than lose the things that make life worth living.”

“Because there were so many disbelievers in women pilots, especially in their place in the army....We had to deliver the goods or else. Or else there wouldn’t ever be another chance for women pilots in any part of the service.”

The WAFS ferried planes for the U.S. military during WWII, flying them from factories to points of embarkation. The group later merged with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP).

The women pilots faced painful prejudice from some of the male pilots, who Cornelia said went "to great lengths to discredit them whenever possible.”

The end came quickly, and far to soon. March 21, 1943, flying over Texas in a six-plane formation, Cornelia's Fort's wing tip was clipped by another plane. She crashed to the ground and died instantly.

Cornelia was twenty-four, and became the first female pilot in American history to die in the line of duty, though the WAFS were not recognized as official military service members 1977.​​​​​​​

A year prior to her death, Cornelia had written her mother, poetically describing how much she had loved life, loved green pastures and cities,

sunshine on the plains and rain in the mountains, blue jeans, red wine, books, music and the kindness of friends. She wrote:

If I die violently, who can say it was "before my time"? I should have dearly loved to have had a husband and children. My talents in that line would have been pretty good but if that was not to be, I want no one to grieve for me.

I was happiest in the sky--at dawn when the quietness of the air was like a caress, when the noon sun beat down and at dusk when the sky was drenched with the fading light. Think of me there and remember me​​​​​​​...Love, Cornelia.

Cornelia's story reminds me we do not have time to be mired in self-doubt and regret. We make the best decisions we can without the benefit of knowing how they will unfold. Like Cornelia, I want to choose boldly and love life hugely. What about you?

When you hear the call: "Build the wall"take a moment and tell someone about Carmellita Torres.

This 17-year-old girl sparked a protest on the Juarez/El Paso border in 1917 when customs officials ordered her to undress and submit to being doused with gasoline.

The kind of guys in charge back then were the same kind of guys we have in charge now. So, unfortunately, Carmellita's ​courageous action did not bring change.

But women's voices are being heard today, in way they never have been before.

Carmellita Torres freely crossed the border from Mexico almost every day to work as a maid for an American family. She wasn't alone.

Farmers and ranchers in the Southwest were completely dependent on Mexican labor. White families in El Paso could easily afford the wages they paid Mexican girls and women to do their cleaning and laundry.

So many Mexicans from Juarez came to El Paso every day for work that a trolley was set up for them to ride across the Santa Fe Bridge between the two cities.

But El Paso Mayor Tom Lea, Jr. feared Carmellita and the other workers, whom he called "dirty, lousy, destitute," would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic in his city.

Rates of typhus infection were no higher in El Paso, than they were in other large American cities. But in January 1917, Mexicans were suddenly required to show a certificate to cross the border, a certificate indicating that "the bearer, ___ has been this day deloused, bathed, vaccinated, clothing and baggage disinfected.”​​​​​​​

Carmellita and the others were forced to strip nude for inspection, bathe, and be drenched in gasoline to kill any lice that might be on their bodies. Their clothing and shoes were fumigated and put through a steam dryer.

The women were subjected to lewd comments and there were rumors that nude photographs of them were showing up in nearby bars.

Sunday morning, January 28th, 1917, Carmellita reached the end of her trolley ride and was told to get off, take a bath and bedisinfected. She refused.

Carmellita convinced thirty other women on the trolley to refuse as well. By 8AM the crowd of protesters, mostly servant girls, grew to 200 and packed half the bridge. Some of the women stopped the trolley by laying down on ​the tracks. By noon some 2000 people stood with Carmellita.

Both Mexican and American soldiers showed up to subdue the crowd, and Monday morning it was back to fumigation as usual.

There's little trace of Carmellita Torres in the pages of history. She's named in the newspaper for leading what came to be called"the bath house riots," and we know that she and eight other women were arrested and went to jail for "inciting riot" that day.

Their stories may have been passed down the years orally, but the white men writing the newspapers and making the rulespreserved a different story.

The reporter for the El Paso Morning Times wrote that once​Mexicans got familiar with the bathing process, they would welcome it. He said the Mexicans"came out [of the bath house] with clothes wrinkled from the steam sterilizer, hair wet and faces shining, generally laughing and in good humor."

Raul Delgado, a man who went through the "cleansing" gave his description decades later. “An immigration agent with a fumigation pump would spray our whole body with insecticide, especially our rear and our partes nobles. Some of us ran away from the spray and began to cough. Some even vomited from the stench of those chemical pesticides…the agent would laugh at the grimacing faces we would make. He had a gas mask on, but we didn’t."

Bracero workers, hired for seasonal farm work, are sprayed with DDT after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in 1956. (Smithsonian Institution)​​​​​​​

​The risk of typhus has been used by both American and German leaders to whip up fear and prejudice against a segment of the population they wanted to deem inferior.

​The notion that Mexicans crossing into the U.S. for work each day would carry lice and cause a typhus epidemic, was used as an excuse to spray them with toxic chemicals. Men, women and children crossing the Juarez/El Paso border were doused or sprayed with chemicals like gasoline and DDT for more than 40-years.

​In Poland, the Nazis posted placards around Warsaw in 1940 declaring that Jewish people were infested with lice and carrying typhus. To protect the rest of the populace all Jews were required to move into a small section of the city that became the Warsaw Ghetto. ​

"These records point to the connection between the U.S. Customs disinfection facilities in El Paso-Juárez in the 20s and the Desinfektionskammern (disinfection chambers) in Nazi Germany...."

I discovered an article written in a German scientific journal written in 1938, which specifically praised the El Paso method of fumigating Mexican immigrants with Zyklon B," writes Romo.

In 1939, the Nazis started usingZyklon B to fumigate people at border crossings and concentration camps. Later, they used Zyklon B pellets in the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps, not to kill lice, but people.

In 1917, after Carmellita's protest, the US/Mexican border was closed for the first time, customs officialsprohibiting anyone from crossing without authorization. That is, without the required fumigation of their clothing, shoes and body.

That year alone, 127,000 people suffered humiliation and were doused with toxic disinfectant at the El Paso end of the Santa Fe Bridge. This federal policy would promulgate a stereotypical negative view of Mexicans and their American descendants for decades to come.​U.S. Public Health Service photos thanks to https://elpasogasbaths.weebly.com/​​​​​​​

Marjory Stoneman Douglas earned her place in history for helping preserve the Florida Everglades.​​​​​​​She did it all in the second half of life.

At first glance Marjory appears an unlikely heroine. She began her journalism career as the society reporter for the Miami Herald and later published short stories and novels.

She rarely went out for a picnic, let alone visited the crocodile invested Everglades, saying it was "too buggy, too wet, and too generally inhospitable....I know it’s out there, and I know it’s important.... There are no other Everglades in the world."

South Florida land developers considered the Everglades a useless swamp just waiting for them to turn it into shopping malls and subdivision.

​​​​Marjory wrote stories set in South Florida and vividly described the natural world. She was writing a novel 1941 when an editor asked her to write a non-fiction book addressing threats to the Everglades and she agreed.

Scientists warned if the area wasn't protected, soon all wildlife there would be extinct.

They are unique...in the simplicity, the diversity, the related harmony of the forms of life they enclose," wrote Marjory.​​​​​​​"The miracle of the light pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida."

At age 57, Marjory published The Everglades: River of Grass. It hit the shelves in November 1947 and sold out before Christmas. The impact of the book is sometimes compared to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

And it launched Marjory into her role as an environmental activist, which took up the next 51-years of her life.She founded Friends of the Everglades, wrote more books on the subject and fought developers, the Army Corp of Engineers, and anyone else who threatened the unique species and habitat of South Florida.

"[She's a] tiny, slim, perfectly dressed, utterly ferocious grande dame who can make a redneck shake in his boots," said Assistant Secretary of the Interior Nathaniel Reed. "When Marjory bites you, you bleed."

Marjory's wisdom is crucial today as we face climate change. She said. "I would be very sad if I had not fought. I'd have a guilty conscience if I had been here and watched all this happen to the environment and not been on the right side."

In 1990, Marjory published her autobiography, Voice of the River beginning with the admission "the hardest thing is to tell the truth about oneself."

And ending with the advice, "life should be lived so vividly and so intensely that thoughts of another life, or a longer life, are not necessary."

Marjory lived “my own life in my own way,” for 108 years.​​​​​​​ Her spirit gives me hope and challenges me live vividly and intensely.

Second grader LaVaun Smith heard agreat uproar outside her school in southeast Kansas. She and the other students rushed to the door of their country school house to see the commotion.

They threw open the door that cold December day in 1921, and a rowdy parade of women filled the road beating on dish pans, wash pans and metal buckets with sticks and kitchen utensils. A number of the students spotted their mothers as the women converged on the mine across the road to confront strike-breakers, who had taken their husbands' coal mining jobs.

The school kids' dads had struck the mines in Crawford and Cherokee County three months prior, but companies kept operations running with non-union workers, and the sheriff arrested labor leaders for violating a statewide strike injunction.With a harsh winter on the horizen coming, wives, mothers, and sisters of the mine workers decided to take things into their own hands. Gathering before dawn, December 12, they marched through the region, routing "scabs" at 63 different mines.

No fear in these women’s hearts

One marcher recorded in her diary, the women “rolled down to the [mine] pits like balls and the men ran like deers....There was absolutely no fear in these women’s hearts.”

The throng of marching women, some pregnant and others carrying small children, grew from two-thousand to possibly six-thousand. For three days they completely shut down coal production in the region.​​

One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had immigrated from Slovenia as a child. ​According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a house."

Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers.

Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags.

The first day there was little violence, but the following two days when large numbers of men joined the protest, strikebreakers were beaten and property vandalized, inflaming headlines across the nation.

The New York Times declared them an Amazon Army...on the warpath...invading mines and scattering workers with pepper spray.

December 16, Sheriff Milt Gould arrested Mary and three other women, who spent one night in jail due a $750 bail.

Over the following month, the sheriff and his deputies hoped to make massive arrests, bystanders would not cooperate in naming names, and women protesters told deputies they could not recall who had marched beside them.

Deputies jailed 50-some men and women who participated in the action. AndCrawford County District Judge Andrew Curran handed down fines to forty-nine protesters for disturbing the peace, unlawful assembly, and assault.

The marching women were characterized by the newspapers in one of two ways. Benjamin W. Goossen write in Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains (Autumn 2011), "​​​​​​​either it was a laughable “Petticoat March” of witless and misguided domestics, or the attack of a ferocious 'Amazon Army' that threatened to destroy traditional notions of women’s role in society." ​​​​​

The Wichita Beacon described them as “a few women, peeking from behind windows, sometimes waving handkerchiefs and sometimes ‘making eyes’ at the soldiers."

The Kansas City Kansan labed them “women terrorists,” who “clawed and used teeth” like “tigresses.”

Some of the women defended themselves in letters to the editors, and small groups of women continued to accost strikebreakers even after the strike was called off.

The following election season, (this was just two years after American women got the vote) the women who had tested their strength marching turned their energy to campaigning against the men who'd opposed them. Both Sheriff Gould, who had arrested dozens of marchers and Judge Curran, who had sentenced them were ousted from office.

Author Jim Ure was writing a novel when a true story side-tracked him, the story of a woman's disappearance that has remained unsolved for more than seventy years.

His new book,Seized by the Sun tells how Gertrude Tompkins (left), a shy, awkward girl who stuttered, growing up to be one of only a handful of U.S. women test pilots during WWII. Her job was to take new or repaired planes to the sky and put them through tight turns, stalls, dives and spins making sure they were safe.

Below: P-51 Mustang fighter​​​​​​​s. Gertrude was one of only 126 WASP pilots good enough to fly these fighter planes. Her first flight in a powerful P-51 cured the debilitating stutter that had plagued her since childhood.

It was later in the war, on a routine flight, that Gertrude disappeared while ferrying a factory-new plane a short distance between two airfields in California

Author James Ure is on the blog today, telling us how he got hooked on the story.

Author Jim Ure

​​​​In the summer of the 2000 I was doing some research for an idea I had about a novel. My writing success had come in non-fiction, but the illusive novel still beckoned.

​In this fictional piece I imagined a character who learned his mother had been a woman pilot in World War II and her crashed plane and her remains had just been discovered in a melting glacier in Montana.

I put a note on what I was doing on a Women’s Air Force Pilot user group on Yahoo. The result was unexpected.

I was contacted by the grand niece of Gertrude “Tommy” Tompkins. Laura Whittall-Scherfee, who lives near Sacramento, told me that of the 38 women killed in the WASP during World War II, her grand aunt was the only one still missing.​​​

She was called, “The Other Amelia,” and a sort of cult had grown among the searchers who continue to look for her to this day. Laura and her husband Ken offered me access to the family records. Would I be interested?

Would I ever!

I’d always had a fascination for World War II aviation, and this was an enticement I couldn’t refuse.​It took seventeen years of interviews, combing military files and reading private correspondence to finally give Tommy the fully-dimensional place in aviation history she deserved. I was lucky to have conversations with a number of WASPs early in my research. Today only about 85 WASPs of the 1,175 who were in service during the war are still alive.Tommy took off from Mines Air Field (now LAX) on October 26, 1944, and was expected to stay at the Army Air Force Base in Palm Springs that evening. She was never seen again. Aircraft historian Pat Macha has conducted numerous searches over the years and no trace has ever turned up.

Below: A group of WASPs pray for luck before climbing into a BT-13 unpredictable and sometimes dangerous training plane. Avenger Field, Sweetwater, Texas, circa 1943.

Courtesy WASP Archives, Texas Women's University Library.

The conclusion I have come to after all this time is that she probably crashed into Santa Monica Bay immediately after take-off.

The results of searches of the bay and of the mountains and deserts on her presumed flight path are documented in Seized by the Sun. It’s a mystery yet to be solved, and there are men and women still searching for Tommy.

Above, WASPs with PT-19, the first plane usually flown in primary training. Women on far left in dark glasses is Gertrude “Tommy” Tompkins, according to Texas Women’s University Libraries WASP Archives.

​No one knows whether Elizabeth Kenny had any formal medical training or learned on-the-job, but that didn’t stop her.

She had a red cape and nurse’s jumper made and traveled through Australia’s wild bush land to serve anyone who needed help.​​​​​​​ ​​​​​​​

Born in Australia in 1880, at a time when girls were not to be brassy, stubborn, or opinionated. Elizabeth had no intention of following those rules.

I first heard about Elizabeth Kenny when my father had a stroke and was transferred to the Elizabeth Kenny Institute in Minneapolis for recovery. Prior to that, I knew of her in name only.

Author Susan Latta

​​I remember standing in a long line in the school gym waiting to receive my vaccination in the early 1960s, and had no idea how many people suffered after being stricken by polio.Decades earlier Elizabeth Kenny had become famous for her treatment for polio, a dreadful virus that caused paralysis and death.

Elizabeth didn’t know it at the time but discovered her polio treatment one day in 1911.

​A frantic farmer called for help for his two-year-old daughter. Amy's arms andlegs were twisted tight with unbearable pain.

Elizabeth Kenny galloped away to send a telegram to her trusted doctor, Aeneas McDonnell. When he replied that it was polio, he said there was nothing to be done, and to do “the best with symptoms presenting themselves.”

"I knew the relaxing power of heat," Elizabeth said. "I filled a frying pan with salt, placed it over the fire, then poured it into a bag and applied it to the leg that was giving the most pain. After an anxious wait, I saw no relief followed the application. I then prepared a linseed meal poultice, but the weight of this seemed only to increase the pain.

"At last I tore a blanket made from soft Australian wool into suitable strips and wrung them out in boiling water. These I wrapped gently about the poor tortured muscles. The whimpering of the child ceased almost immediately, and after a few more applications her eyes closed slowly and she fell asleep.”

Amy recovered. But men in the medical field refused to accept Elizabeth's methods.

In 1914, Elizabeth Kenny traveled to England to serve in WWI. The Australian Army Nursing Service gave her the title of “sister,” which had nothing to do with religion, instead meaning “senior nurse.” She became known as Sister Kenny.

After the war, she presented her methods to control the muscle spasms and re-educate the paralyzed limbs to packed rooms of medical men in Australia. Over and over they called her a quack nurse from the bush, and finally she had had enough. She sailed to America to prove her treatment.

After being turned away by doctors in New York and Chicago, she landed in Minnesota where a few doctors said her treatment did work.

As word spread she gained nationwide support, even landing on a list of most admired women in America nine years running. ​​​​​​​The Elizabeth Kenny Institute opened in 1942, and still exists today as Courage Kenny, a facility for stroke and accident victims.​At right: A patient is treated in an Iron Lung circa 1960s. Photo courtesy U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Polio was eradicated in America when Albert Sabin’s live polio virus vaccine guaranteed immunity, just a few short years after Sister Kenny died in 1952.​​​​​​​

You will hear arguments that labor unions are obsolete. Twenty-eight states have passed anti-union legislation.

But we have as many American workers in poverty as ever before.

And we have a new generation of labor activists fighting for workers' rights.​

This Labor Day, let's celebrate those dedicated workers doing important , yet nearly invisible labor, on wages they can barely live on.

Take one minute and watch the video below. Let Nancy inspire you!

Photo courtesy of Caring Across Generations

More than sixty-five million people in America work day in and day out as family caregivers, nannies, housekeepers and home healthcare workers—that's more than the populations of California and Texas combined.​Yet, they are mostly invisible except to the families they serve. They work with many of our most vulnerable people, the elderly, the disabled, the very young.No surprise, our economy does not value this and they have few legal protections. Many tolerate low, or no pay and abusive ​employers.D’Rosa Davis is a member of the Atlanta Chapter of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which lobbies for workers rights and fair compensation. She toldCaring Acros Generations,

​ “I earn $9 an hour....I work 70 hours one week, and then around 45 the next week...Like any mom I wish I didn’t haven’t to work so much — but when at $9 an hour what choice do I have? Earning so little means I can’t do much with my kids — and that breaks my heart."

Traditional labor union bargaining over wages and hours doesn't work between families and caregivers, inspiring young activists like Ai-jen Poo to be creative. (I told you about her here....)

Photo Courtesy Time Magazine

Ai-Jen Poo (left) works to bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders in the community to work together to improve the lives of workers and change the way we as a culture perceive labor.

She told me, "As inequality continues to rise & technology transforms jobs, we must reaffirm the value & centrality of work, and build a movement that allows workers to be a part of shaping the future of work."

Again, not surprising, it's mostly women's work she's talking about.

​Ninety percent of home health aides and 95% of domestic workers are women. Women are 47% of our country's ​workforce, and nearly half of them contribute an equal share to the family budget or are the primary breadwinners in the family. Ninety percent of working women do not belong to unions.

Another group of hard working, women who often live in poverty are restaurant servers.

Aisha Thurman, told ROC, male customers “think, you know, my body is for them to enjoy, to look at, touch, say what they want.

​They think if they throw me a couple dollars in the form of a tip, it’s OK.”

Immigrants who fear deportation if they complain of abuse and women of color have it the worst. A recent report by the Institute of Policy Research, found that while black women vote at high rates, are increasingly earning college degrees and succeeding in owning their own businesses, they still earn less than white men and women.

• Black women who worked full-time and year-round had median annual earnings that were 65% percent what white men earn. • ​​​​​​​Nearly a quarter of the nation’s black women,live in poverty, more than twice the percentage of white women.​​​​

Photo courtesy Seattle Times

Then there's the hotel/motel industry...

​A study of phone calls to the National Human Trafficking Hotline showed 124 reports came in concerning "slave" workers in the hospitality industry in the last nine years. (Non-sex related)

Another 510 calls reported workplace abuse and labor violations. Calls to a hotline most likely represent the tip of an iceberg.

At left, Sonia Guevara, employed at a downtown Seattle hotel, voiced support for Initiative 124 which assured hotel workers new rights related to assault and sexual harassment, injuries, workloads, medical care and changes in hotel ownership.

Though some labor activist methods may be new, one part that doesn't changes is the importance of inspiring workers to believe they deserve better and to have the courage to take risks to better their situation.

Some other women in the new labor movement you might like to check out are Saru Jayaraman who founded ROC to aid restaurant workers, Nadia Marin Molinawho has a labor rights resume a page long, and ​Sarita Gupta at Jobs With Justice.

These women are not afraid to take on company bosses. They are also working creatively to build broad support across communities for workers rights and greater justice in the lives of poor women and children.

Plenty to think about and celebrate as we enjoy the last long weekend of summer.

During my research into the American WWII Nurses captured POW by the Japanese, I learned they were the "first large group" of American women sent into combat.

When I wrote PURE GRITI didn't know about the Hello Girls, a group of American women, telephone operators, who volunteered for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in World War I.

The terms "large group" and "combat" can be debated, but what's clear is that here is another group of brave women that have only recently begun to take their rightful place in history.

Grace Banker (right) was one of 223 women telephone operators who shipped out to England and France with American troops to aid communicationbetween commanders and soldiers on the battlefield.

Grace was the chief operator of a small group sent to the front during the Muese-Argonne Offensive, the deadliest campaign in U.S. military history, killing 26,000 Americans in the final terrible onslaught that ended the war.

The seven women operators worked near Verdun, France, connecting calls while German planes flew overhead and shrapnel landed close by.

On October 30, 1919, two weeks before the war ended, a number of buildings housing American headquarters went up in flames. ​​​​​​​The women were ordered to leave the switchboard, but they refused, continuing to connect calls as the fire raged nearer and nearer.

They refused to leave their posts until threatened with disciplinary action by their superior officer. When the fire was doused an hour later, the women returned to the switchboard, found some of the lines still working and picked up where they had left off. The seven women later received Distinguished Service Medals for their courage and dedication to duty.

When U.S. troops arrived to join the war in Europe, they found the telephone service in France badly damaged by years of combat. Signal Corps crews quickly stretched a far-flung web of lines across Allied territory to hook up communication between units in battle, supply depots and military headquarters.

General John J. Pershing, Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces was frustrated with French telephone operators who didn't speak English and tended to spend time on social niceties before connecting calls.

He sent an urgent appeal to American newspapers for women who could speak French, operate the complicated switchboards, and free up men for combat. Seven-thousand women applied.

Only 450-were chosen for military training, and half of those deployed to Europe. Most were already trained operators employed by U.S. telephone companies, and dexterous enough to connect five calls in the time a man did one.

During the Muese-Argonne Offensive, they connected over 150,000 calls a day.

Identity papers for Blanche B. Grande-Maitre (above) show her to be five-foot-two and 110 pounds. The contracts the Hello Girls signed differed little from army enlistment papers, and they "signed up for the duration."

At the switchboard in Tours, France

hey were treated just like soldiers and subject to the same “discomforts and dangers” including

unheated barracks, bombings and mortar fire, according to the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the army newspaper Stars and Stripes.

“According to their superior officers, both in the Signal Corps and on the General Staff, they have shown remarkable spirit and utter absence of nerves.”

General Pershing praised the women's work, saying they had more patience and perseverance for the job than men, and other officers believed they played a crucial role in helping win the war.

But like the nurses in Pure Grit, when the hostilities ceased and they returned home, because they were women, they were not given their due. The Hello Girls did not qualify as veterans, receiving no benefits, and only a handful were recognized with medals.

It took an act of congress, and sixty years before the Hello Girls received their Honorable army discharges, veteran status and victory medals. Fifty of the women remained alive to enjoy the moment.

First day of summer, I dragged out my bicycle, my wonderful husband pumped up the flat tires, and I vowed to start riding it more and driving the car less.

To inspire myself, I'm writing the story of Gino Bartali, one of the greatest cyclists of all time and a genuine hero.

“Good is something you do, not something you talk about. Some medals are pinned to your soul, not to your jacket.” So said this two-time winner of the Tour de France. Above, Gino Bartali in 1936.

In between his cycling victories, Bartali helped save some 800 Jews from the Nazis.

​Gino Bartali grew from humble beginnings in rural Tuscany, his father a day laborer, his mother a lace maker.

At age 11 he rode a bicycle to school in Florence from his village Ponte a Ema.

Wheeling through the Tuscany hills, Gino developed a love for cycling, and a heart for tackling mountains.

He won his first race at the age of 17, and at 24, rode to victory in the 1938 Tour de France, gaining international acclaim.

Back in Italy, Benito Mussolini wanted to claim Bartali's victory as proof Italians were part of the master race, but in a risky move, Gino refused to go along with the fascist dictator.

In the 1938 Tour de France, Gino Bartali was first over the Col de Vars in the 14th stage.

When World War II sidetracked Gino's cycling career, he found an even more valuable way to use his bike. In 1943, Germany occupied Italy and the Nazis started shipping Italian Jews to concentration camps. Bartali agreed to aid the Italian Resistance as a courier.

Under the guise of long training rides and wearing an Italian racing jersey, Bartali risked his life transporting photographs and counterfeit documents in the hollow frame and handlebars of his bicycle.

The photos and documents provided Italian Jews with false identity cards to protect them from the Nazis.​​​​​​​ People caught helping Jews evade capture were often executed immediately.

Bartali saved a friend Giacomo Goldenberg and his family by providing food and hiding them in an apartment he owned in Florence.

Without his help, the family would most probably have died in the Holocaust. At left, the Goldenberg family--Elvira and Giacomo with their son Giorgio and their daughter Tea.

In July 1944, Bartali was arrested and interrogated at Villa Triste in Florence, where local Fascist officials questioned and tortured prisoners. Fortunately, one of the interrogators had known Bartali before the war and convinced the others he should be let go.

When the war was over, Gino went back to racing, racking up a third career victory in the Giro d'Italia in 1946, shown above. Then he shocked the cycling world by returning to win the Tour de France again, ten years after his first victory. No other cyclist has achieved that feat.

Bartali was known as a fierce competitor up until he retired at age 40, after being injured in a road accident. He was somewhat of a loudmouth on the cycling circuit, but modest about the fact he's credited with helping save the lives of hundreds of people. The story did not come out before he passed away in 2000.​

Biographer, Ali McConnon told CNN,"He was very modest about it. He held a profound sense that so many had suffered in a much greater capacity than he had. He didn't want to be in the spotlight or diminish the contributions of others."​Bartali rarely spoke of his actions in the war. When asked by another reporter to recount his greatest victory, Gino said, “I won the challenge of life, winning the love of the people.”​​​​​​​

Imagine devoting your entire adult life to a cause, living more than 90-years, and dying with unfinished business.

Alice Paul believed that men and women should be equal partners in society, and she was behind most 20th Century efforts for women's rights in the United States, including women's right to vote.

Now, close to 100 years after Alice Paul started the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, women in the U.S. are still second class citizens under the law. (See video below)

In October 1917, Alice Paul and three other suffragists were arrested for protesting at the west gate of the White House. She did not go quietly, believing that equal rights for women would not be gained without extreme measures.

Confined behind bars, her only power was refusing to eat. She had resorted to hunger strikes before when arrested in England.

When the forcible feeding was ordered I was taken from my bed, carried to another room and forced into a chair, bound with sheets and sat upon bodily by a fat murderer, whose duty it was to keep me still. Then the prison doctor, assisted by two woman attendants, placed a rubber tube up my nostrils and pumped liquid food through it into the stomach. Twice a day for a month, from November 1 to December 1, this was done. ~Alice Paul Talks, Philadelphia Tribune, January 1910.

A new biography of Alice Paul brings the story of this less-well-known suffragist to teenagers in ALICE PAUL AND THE FIGHT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS.

Author Deborah Kops agreed to talk with me about Alice's passion and determination.

Deborah Kops: I am awed by Paul’s courage and her willingness to risk her life to help women win the vote. Her health was fragile, and she jeopardized it on a regular basis when she was young.

Paul went on her longest hunger strike, which lasted three weeks, in 1917, when she was in jail in Washington, D.C.(she went on three hunger strikes years before in the UK).

For most of that time, she was force fed, which is very painful. A hunger strike was her only means of fighting her imprisonment and reminding the public that women wanted the ballot.​​​​​​​She and the other Woman’s Party members who went without food (more than twenty) got plenty of coverage in newspapers around the country, which embarrassed Woodrow Wilson. Less than two months after Paul’s release, Wilson finally announced his support for the woman suffrageamendment.

​I became a feminist during the women’s movement of the late sixties and early seventies, which historians call the second wave. And I assumed that the Equal Rights Amendment, which we were fighting for, was written in the sixties. I learned that the amendment was Alice Paul’s idea and that she wrote it in 1923!

​​​​​​​A century later, when Hillary Clinton made her acceptance speech as the first woman nominated by a major political party for the presidency, I was very touched to see her wearing white, the color that suffragists often wore beneath their sashes.

When I joined the Women’s March in Boston in January, I was very proud to wear a sash with the National Woman’s Party colors—purple, white, and gold—over my jacket.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Thank you for taking time for this interview, Deborah, and for writing about this courageous woman!

You can see all of Deborah Kops books at her website here, including The Great Molasses Flood: Boston, 1919 which Kirkus Reviews calls A fascinating account of a truly bizarre disaster.

Back to the Equal Rights Amendment. If you know anyone living in the states colored yellow below...ask them if they know their state has not ratified the ERA.
Then check out the video below (it's less than two minutes long). Feel free to forward this newsletter. Thankswww.equalrightsamendment.org for the map.

Just three weeks ago Nevada became the 36th state to ratify the ERA (45 years to the day after Congress passed it). This year ERA bills have been introduced in the legislatures of Arizona, Florida, Illinois, North Carolina, Utah, and Virginia.

Author

I'm an award-winning author of Children's/YA books and former journalist with a passion for stories about people facing adversity with courage. My books have been named Notable Social Studies Book for Young People, SPUR Award for Best Juvenile Fiction about the American West, Bank Street College List of Best Children's Books, and NY Public Library Best Books for Teens. My journalistic work has received numerous awards for excellence from the Society of Professional Journalists and two Emmy nominations.